On the Line

How one of Columbia’s oldest student resources lost the battle for its future. 

By Chris Brown

Illustration by Em Bennett

Hello, Nightline, Barnard/Columbia Peer Listening.

For four decades, Columbia students have heard those words in hours of need. But for the last four semesters, Nightline has been mostly unavailable, engaged in a fight for its future with the Columbia administration. At the end of this year, its phones will likely go silent forever.  

Nightline is Columbia’s peer listening service. During nighttime hours, any member of the Columbia community can call Nightline and talk to one of its anonymous peer listeners—trained undergraduate students who provide an ear to problems big and small, successes and failures. Its two-way anonymity was its most striking feature, with neither the caller nor the listener identifying themselves. My first encounter with Nightline came as an Orientation Leader, where it was introduced by Columbia as one of the resources that we could recommend to our students for mental health support. Its number was also on the back of every freshman dorm door alongside numbers like CUEMS, Columbia Psychological Services, and 911. 

The organization was founded in the 1985-1986 academic year, opening its lines for the first time in the spring of 1986. That makes this its fortieth year—and likely its last. The service was created to provide peer support to students during the hours when other mental health services were unavailable. College students don’t tend to operate on the same hours as professionals, and, according to its founders, “nighttime is a particularly vulnerable time.” Columbia had already lagged behind its peers in creating a peer listening service, and Cornell, Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth, and Wesleyan’s equivalents all predated Nightline by at least five years. 

Much of Nightline’s early calls concerned the AIDS epidemic. Already by 1986, its peer listeners were receiving training on how to deal with calls relating to crisis topics like AIDS, and the service had become part of the mental health fabric of Columbia. At the time, Nightline received the support of the student councils of the College, SEAS, and Barnard, along with Columbia’s Volunteer Service Center. 

And so it was that Nightline went on for the next two decades, embedded in the fabric of student life at Columbia. The 1990s and 2000s saw it featured frequently in Spectator as a resource alongside CPS, with generally no reporting questioning Nightline’s existence. All of this led me to ask: Why now?

In 2012, Nightline’s phones  closed for the first time so that its staff members could receive extra training on how to handle sexual violence calls. Nightline then-co-Director Lori Goldman, BC ’13, said at that time that it was part of an effort to provide legal protection to Nightline and their staff. This was the first time that legality officially entered the conversation around Nightline, but it would become central to the fight between Nightline and administration in the years that followed. 

But before the language of the law re-entered the story, Nightline was first embroiled in an entirely different controversy. While student attention was largely focused on the protest movement in the spring of 2024, Nightline was dealing with its own struggles. A petition circulated in March of that year, accusing Nightline of creating a hostile internal work environment and discriminating against callers on the basis of race and gender. After the petition reached the Barnard Student Government Association on Feb. 26 and then Nightline on March 3, the SGA voted to release it publicly on their Instagram on March 4. The petition called for the organization to issue a public apology, the removal of two staff members, and changes in internal structure. It also requested a formal acknowledgement of “South Africa’s case accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza,” due to a perceived bias in the way Nightline had addressed the situation in an email. The email, sent to Nightline staff, referred to the situation as “The Ongoing Tragedy in Israel.” The directors of Nightline that I spoke with challenged the claims made in the petition and stated that the organization had already been making the internal changes necessary before the petition was ever publicized. In April of that semester, Nightline closed its lines once more to perform internal restructuring. 

But behind the scenes, a different problem was developing for Nightline. Though it was often connected with services like CPS as on-campus resources for mental health, Nightline had never officially been  part of it. Instead, Nightline was a club, subject to the rules of recognition that all other clubs go through. Nightline was officially recognized under the Activities Board at Columbia, but was also given a club advisor from Barnard due to their offices being housed on Barnard’s campus. Their previous long-term advisor, MJ Murphy, stepped down that spring and was replaced by Marina Catallozzi, the new Vice President of Health and Wellness and Chief Health Officer. During the summer and early fall of 2024, the Nightline directors met with Catallozzi, who expressed reservations about its continued existence. According to the Directors, Catallozzi felt that Barnard was investing significantly in mental health resources—such as the LeFrak Center, which was set to open that fall—and that they did not want to invest more resources into a student-run organization. Due to these ongoing discussions, Nightline was unable to resume operations and remained closed for the entire fall semester of 2024.

Barnard’s severance from the club was damaging to Nightline in more ways than one. For much of their existence, Nightline’s offices had been run out of an unspecified location on Barnard’s campus. The organization was left without a home: Barnard painted over the walls in their offices that held Nightline history, and all of their archives and equipment were moved out. The walls themselves held traces of Nightline from its very beginning, with self portraits of all the callers from the 1980s onward.

Though negotiations with Barnard had been unsuccessful, Nightline remained in good standing with ABC and Columbia. In the spring of 2025, they were able to reopen their lines, with a catch: They were no longer allowed to serve Barnard students. 

Nightline released this news in a Spectator op-ed, taking responsibility for some of the points that had been in the petition, but refuting others. The op-ed states that the petition that spring may have played a part in Barnard’s decision to cut ties with the organization, but by the time I spoke with the directors, they were convinced that the petition had little to do with Barnard severing the connection. Instead, they pointed me to a link between campus mental health resources, University legal, and Nightline. 

This time, the lines managed to stay open for the semester. The Directors presented a petition—signed by the student councils, clubs, and students—requesting that Barnard allow Nightline to reopen in April, but were once again stonewalled by Dean of Campus Life, Leslie Grinage.  

The summer progressed as normal, and Nightline and its staff were ready to spend the fall semester of 2025 rebuilding, as it was to be the first time that they’d been consistently in operation for two straight semesters since the fall of 2023. But there were new players on campus. Just as Barnard had been going through administrative turnover, so had Columbia. Dean of University Student Life, Cristen Kromm, who had occupied the post for nearly two decades, had resigned in the summer of 2024, and Dean Roger Lehecka, CC ’67, had returned to the post as interim. Lehecka, according to the directors, had been an ally to Nightline and had met with them regularly during the year he held the position. The search for a new full-time USL Dean was completed in the summer of 2025, and as the new semester started, so did Dean Kamala Kiem. 

As part of Kiem’s project of learning about Columbia, she met with Nightline in September of 2025 to learn more about who they were and what role they played in undergraduate life. The meeting, according to the directors, was productive, and Nightline continued its operations at the beginning of the semester. But in October, they were once again called into a meeting with Dean Kiem and Nightline’s Columbia advisor, Stephanie King. Kiem and King informed the team that they would, again, have to pause their operations. Without the support of Barnard, it was simply too much work to continue Nightline with only Columbia’s undergraduate resources. Nightline’s temporary run of success had come to an end. 

But there was something strange about the way that Nightline’s operations had been paused: It didn’t follow the normal channels. Nightline, as a club recognized by ABC, was subject to ABC’s policies and guidelines, with ABC nominally being responsible for whether it continued to operate. Yet Nightline had not violated any ABC rules. 

I spoke with Armando Gimenez, CC ’26, who was the president of ABC between the spring of 2025 and the spring of 2026, and the treasurer for the year preceding. According to Gimenez, it is generally the job of ABC to represent and advocate for their clubs in the face of administration. But for many of the meetings around Nightline, ABC was completely uninvolved. ABC clubs are also only categorized as “recognized,” “probationary,” or “derecognized.” The language of pause and suspension used by the administration had no definition in ABC’s rules, and Nightline had actually already undergone a constitution review by ABC in the wake of the Barnard petition. While suspended, not only could Nightline not take calls anymore, but it wasn’t allowed to recruit, post, or hold meetings, either. 

Though he hasn’t been informed directly, Gimenez speculates that the decision for Nightline’s suspension was handed down by the University’s counsel, the team of lawyers working for the University. The Nightline directors take a similar view, as Dean Kiem told them that the decision to suspend them came not from USL, but from higher administration, naming the University’s legal department directly. The Blue & White reached out to Dean Kiem for  comment on the administration’s official position on Nightline, but did not receive a response. 

The language that was used most frequently in the suspension of Nightline was that of “crisis calls.” These are calls that feature someone in major distress, who may be a danger to themselves or to others. The Nightline staffer I spoke with said that in his semesters actively taking calls, he never took a crisis call. The directors themselves, Yahya ElGawady, CC ‘26, Alyssa Marianne, CC ‘26, and one who remained anonymous as they were not in a forward-facing position, said they made up a tiny percentage of the calls. But from the University’s point of view, the idea of students taking crisis calls posed a massive liability risk. 

For the University, the much safer option is to funnel these kinds of calls directly to resources like CPS. Investment in mental health resources had been a topic on the administration’s mind since a petition had circulated in the spring of 2023 calling for more support on campus. The administration felt that it had invested sufficient resources into expanding mental health access and, like Barnard, no longer felt the need to sustain a student-run organization like Nightline. 

After October, Nightline was continuously invited to meetings in an attempt to find a way for them to continue operating in a different capacity. Initially, the major demand was that the organization drop its anonymity, but in subsequent meetings, Nightline was informed that it would need a sponsor beyond USL to remain in existence. 

As part of his advocacy work for the club, Gimenez called the Yale and Harvard equivalents of Nightline. Both of these organizations were housed in their university’s equivalent of CPS, where the student listeners are trained by professionals. But, despite meeting with CPS and Alice! Health, Nightline has thus far been unable to find an organization to sponsor them.  

…

On March 9 of this year, the Nightline directors received an email from Dean Kiem:

Nightline will remain in suspension until the end of this academic year. At that time, the organization will be derecognized if the organization is not revised to reflect a peer well-being ambassador model (or similar) … I recognize this may not be the outcome you hoped for, and I want to acknowledge the care and commitment that have gone into Nightline over many years. I appreciate the thoughtful ways you have engaged in these conversations.

And so that’s it. At the end of this year, Nightline will most likely be gone. The “peer well-being ambassador” model proposed would leave Nightline as a front for Columbia’s more “official” mental health channels, stripped of its core service. There will be no more phones, no more office, no more helping the people of Barnumbia. 

Without Nightline, the only overnight option for mental health help on campus will be Protocol, an overnight therapist service contracted by the University that connects students to outside therapists. There will no longer be an option for anyone who isn’t comfortable speaking to a therapist, risking potential escalation to their situation. 

Nightline’s loss isn’t just a loss for the mental health ecosystem at Columbia, though. It’s a loss for all of the Nightline members who have dedicated themselves to making their campus a better place for the last forty years. The Nightline staff member I spoke with attributed his love of helping people through their problems to his experience with the organization. He reminisced about the community that the Nightline workers shared in their offices. All of them were anonymous to the outside, which made them even closer to each other, the staff member said. Next year, he’ll start a masters in Social Work.

As Columbia and Barnard have gone through immense administrative upheaval over the last four years, there is a sense that the University has become increasingly corporatized. Traditions have been lost, with longstanding pillars of our community being reduced to their potential liability. The students’ role is slowly being phased out of campus life in favor of things that are “safer.” Forty years of trust built by Nightline on campus, all gone in an email. 

The mental health ecosystem at Columbia, despite investments into it, is still not enough. I’m a graduating senior at Columbia—since I’ve been here, at least two of my classmates have committed suicide. There is a support session for students who have lost friends to suicide this May, hosted by students. Now, more than ever, students should be banding together in mutual support.